Open Letter Of A Mistress

Confiding it in words seems difficult. Especially of a memory that I pushed away into my mind’s abyss, as if I never owned it.

Perhaps, the need for being touched by a man in the tender age of finding my own true self, led me into it. Or perhaps, it was the intellectual thirst for connecting, caring, nurturing.

It never dawned upon me as an extra-marital affair because I firstly, never accepted it as such, secondly, I was victimized and as every victim who wants to break free, I loathed the idea of embracing the fact that it happened with me, years ago.

Quite frankly, I was drawn to a man, much more intellectual than me, through weird encounters which then, I believed as serendipity. As the idea of being a ‘woman’ who could ‘make love’ was still nascent for me, the entire spell-binding episodes of suddenly meeting him, here and there, enamored me in mysterious ways.

For him, I was a vulnerable, innocent, ‘intellectually thirsty’ female, who could be roped through love, to fill his gap of abysmal loneliness, during the times he stayed away from his wife. In spite of knowing that he was married, I felt no remorse for the ‘wife’, whom I would like to call ‘the other’.

Objectifying the wife endows me a sense of power.

But there was no guilt, no acknowledgement of sin, not because I was naïve but because I believed it was temporary and it did not mean anything. ‘Anything’ in concrete to our human expectations, as I always believed that ‘whatever we own, we end up killing it.’ So, instead of an extra-marital, I would label it as an ‘open relationship’ which had its own pitfalls.

The times we made love, felt mechanical, as if, we were two bodies drawn towards each other in ways, which we did not know. It was not ‘making love’ as an adrenaline-gushing, heartwarming or overwhelming experience which every woman longs for, but more of a habit, which we kept repeating.

He would undress me, a pattern which I had after a couple of times, gotten so used to, that it never aroused me. He never aroused me. Sensational, it wasn’t. Instead, it felt as if we had an idea of having an intercourse, that we sadly failed at.

The only aspect of this entire episode that appealed to me, was the first episode of our mutual closeness. It became more of a whirlpool of emotions, sucking me, especially inside it, as I was the younger one, the one who is more afraid of the future. More sensitive, more humane!

He, on the contrary, took me as an achievement, that in spite of being married, he could appeal to women & hypnotise them.

Sometimes he shared the sex-life that he shared with his wife, who was equally unfortunate. As a man, he knew somehow deep down, that he could not have a woman screaming with orgasmic pleasure if he stroked her. He knew that and in that entire personal fight of hiding, not accepting this truth, he kept on searching for new partners, whom he could experiment on. But I knew, I was not the only one, I would not be the only one in the coming future, too.

At times, he had guilt pangs, as if he was destroying my life by entering into it, but it was a façade, I knew. He quoted Tagore and great poets, I quoted Pablo Neruda as our intimacy tried very hard to develop between ourselves, yet it failed.

We both weren’t afraid of the society, though, at times, I felt abused as how other women, who knew about it, looked at me and called me ‘desperate’.

Even though, they too had their own sexual encounters. The only difference was, their partners were not married, and hence, that made them more self-righteous than me, who was never even asked to explain how tormenting it could be to stay in a relationship with a married man, or for that matter, how much guts it takes.

Time passed, slowly, painfully and sporadically scattered between days and long nights, of separation and then tid-bits of togetherness which never filled the void. It made me realize how selfish love was, that what we ‘cannot own, we always despise’. Slowly, I started manufacturing distance between us, because I did not want to be ‘someone for his service’, like a blind, domesticated ‘daasi’. My own integrity, yes it still exists, did not yield me so much into it, always taking me two steps backward, one step forward.

The End

One day, I ended it, without any feeling at all. No screaming, no pain, no humiliation but rather the happiness of setting myself free from the consent that had developed between us, to be used or to use.

Sometimes I wanted the world to know that I too had been abused in ways I could not describe, but then, whose sympathy, whose empathy was I looking for?

No one could have shared my experience and would always, in our patriarchal society, looked down upon me, because perhaps, in their eyes, I committed a ‘sin.’ In my eyes, I was objectively experimenting. And the more experiments you make, the better it is. It does not matter, if in the end, you are tattered and people pelt stones at you, what matters is that you did try, something which was forbidden, to have your own story, which you control.

Years have passed now. I still do not see myself as the victim of time or that person, but today I know how a man’s touch on my bare body would feel like, and it makes me more cautious.

More serious regarding my cravings to my loneliness! It makes it easier now to delete people who no longer matter, or to turn pages away, because perhaps, this incident played a significant part of making me proud of what I am today. I have no guilt, no remorse. And confiding it in words seems still difficult, especially of a memory thwarted away into my mind’s abyss, as if I never owned it.

Shubhda Chaudhary is a Research Scholar, Featured Writer and a Budding Entrepreneur. She loves researching on Middle Eastern Politics, Role of Foreign Journalists and Arab Media. In addition, she is contributing to the research on an upcoming book on Farmer Suicides in Vidarbha.